The present invention relates to systems for personal electronic devices that are used onboard aircraft during flight.
Under current safety regulations it is not permissible to have a mobile phone turned on during an aircraft flight. Other devices such as laptop computers are permitted to be used only at certain times during the flight.
Devices such as wireless enabled PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) blur the distinction between mobile phone and computer as in addition to the wireless phone capability they contain computer-related functionality that is useful to a user even when the wireless part of the device must not be used. For this reason some wirless enabled PDA's, and other similar devices, can be switched into a “radio-off mode” which disables the radio functions of the device so it can otherwise be used during a flight. For example, one type of wirless-enabled PDA includes a menu icon that can be used to disable the radio. On such PDA, once the radio is displayed, the word “OFF” is shown next to a signal strength indicator on the display screen.
Many larger computing devices such as laptop computers are now also incorporating radio transmitting devices such as Wireless LANs and other peripherals, based on for example IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth™.
It is currently necessary for the user of a wireless capable electronic device to be able to configure the wireless capable device for safe operation onboard an aircraft. However laptop computers in particular can be highly complex devices where the level of expertise necessary to safely reconfgure all the peripherals is such that this is beyond the capability of the average user and a major chore even for the expert user. In addition the wireless aspects of the devices and other peripherals may not be the only sources of interference with aircraft systems. The high frequencies of current microprocessor clock speeds are themselves in the radio frequency spectrum and it may be necessary to reduce the clock speeds of some devices to avoid the possibility of interference.
Thus, there is a need for simple and convenient mechanisms for configuring a personal electronic device for use onboard an aircraft and a need for an indicator that can be used by a variety of devices to indicate to users and/or flight crew that the devices are safe to use mid-flight.